With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, including cellphone devices, handheld devices, handheld computers, smartphones, PDAs, etc., there is a need for improving the user interface experience.
Mobile devices with capacitive or resistive touch capabilities are well known. Modern mobile phones have evolved over recent years to the point where they now possess a broad range of capabilities. They are not only capable of placing and receiving mobile phone calls, multimedia messaging (MMS), and sending and receiving email, they can also access the Internet, are GPS-enabled, possess considerable processing power and large amounts of memory, and are equipped with high-resolution color liquid crystal displays capable of detecting touch input. As such, today's mobile phones are general purpose computing and telecommunication devices capable of running a multitude of applications. For example, modern mobile phones can run, word processing, web browser, navigation system, media player and gaming applications.
Along with these enhanced capabilities has come a demand for larger displays to provide a richer user experience. Mobile phone displays have increased in size to the point where they can now consume almost the entire viewing surface of a phone. To increase the size of displays any further would require an increase in the size of the phones themselves. Even with the display size being at its maximum, the content on the display remains relatively small. Due to the size of content in the display, a finger touching the display can obfuscate the very content being manipulated, making precise operations difficult. As a result, using touch screen user interfaces can often obscure text and provide inconsistent results.